"Should one point out," Solzhenitsyn asked, "that from ancient times a decline of courage has been considered the beginning of the end?"

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1989, 2005, 2015.

These are the years in which the West was tested, the years in which the principles, standards and laws from which modern Western civilization uniquely emerged were challenged. These were the years when those charged and even sworn to defend these principles, standards and laws panicked, flinched and surrendered.

Our first test came in 1989 when, after the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, the mullahs in Iran led by Ayatollah Khomeini issued their "fatwa," or death sentence, against the celebrated author, a British citizen with a wide Western literary following, including in the US, for the Islamic crime of blasphemy against Islam.

Below is the syndicated column I wrote to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, also adapted from this speech (28:00). From Westergaard, to Wilks, to Fawstin: The artist holds a mirror to the Islamized West and it flinches.

Having passed the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I can now say with certainty that something major was missing from all of the ceremonies, the symbolism and the media coverage. It was something that not only captures the meaning of the attacks themselves, but better defines our response to them than any other single thing. It is the face of the age itself, and it is not Osama bin Laden's.

I refer to the most familiar of the 12 Danish Muhammad cartoons, the one by Kurt Westergaard. I always think of this world-famous drawing as "Bomb-head Muhammad," for the lit bomb that serves...

The Iraq debate that has erupted three, seven, eight, twelve years too late may end up disproving the old adage, "Better late than never." Why? Too many glaring omissions from the conversation.

Let's start with Numero Uno: Islam.

Once again, Islam is not part of the discussion.

This omission, as readers of the website know, is nothing new in discourse about American wars in the Islamic world. Many's the time over the past dozen years when I attended Washington confabs where the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan were discussed at length by experts, military officers and elected officials, but Islam was not even mentioned -- and certainly not as as a cultural-legal-political-religious roadblock against the US policy of "nation-building" through "hearts and minds" "counterinsurgency." This is a failed policy, as we have seen.

Earlier this month, Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) released the following statement on the ‘Jade Helm 15’ exercises the federal government plans to stage in Texas and other states:

Over the past few weeks, my office has been inundated with calls referring to the Jade Helm 15 military exercise scheduled to take place between July 15 and September 15, 2015. This military practice has some concerned that the U.S. Army is preparing for modern-day martial law.

Certainly, I can understand these concerns. When leaders within the current administration believe that major threats to the country include those who support the Constitution, are military veterans, or even ‘cling to guns or religion,’ patriotic Americans have reason to be concerned. We have seen people working in this administration use their government positions to persecute people with conservative beliefs in God, country, and notions such as honor and self-reliance. Because of the contempt and antipathy for the true patriots or even Christian saints persecuted for their Christian beliefs, it is no surprise that those who have experienced or noticed such persecution are legitimately suspicious.

As for the association with Bill Buckley, it has been greatly rewarding. Our friendship has had its ups and downs, as seems often the case in the rather difficult relationship between author and publisher, but we published with great success another of his books, McCarthy and His Enemies, which he wrote with Brent Bozell [holds up to this day as an excellent study -- dw]. And we are still on good terms. Buckley was probably more sensitive to criticism in those days than he has since become, and was quick to fire off letters in reply to his critics, some of which I tried, without success, to induce him to tone down. When I sent a copy of God and Man at Yale to T.S. Eliiot, I was disappointed that he did not think it was suitable for publication in England by Faber & Faber, but was gratified to have him say, in his letter of reply, "Thank you ... for sending me Mr. Buckley's book, which interested me very much. While I thought that he made one or two serious mistakes of strategy, I am glad to hear that it has attracted much attention." Buckley, however, was incensed, and in a letter to me commented, "I am astounded and disappointed by the superficiality of T.S. Eliot's remarks about my book." I had expected him to be pleased that Eliot had read the book at all and taken the time to say something about it, but Buckley was a young man then, and his first book was, quite properly, a matter of the utmost seriousness...

The aftershocks of World War II continue to make headlines. Seven decades after the fact, the president of the Czech Republic considers it an "act of bravery" to mention on Russian radio the role played by the Gen. Vlasov's WWII-era Russian defector army, still considered traitors in Putin's Russia, in liberating Prague 70 years ago this month. No mention, however, that days later, the US turned the Vlasov Movement over to Stalin to certain death or the Gulag in the shameful Allied crime of forced repatriation known as Operation Keelhaul.

Now, the AP reports on more reverberations:

BELGRADE, Serbia -- A Belgrade court on Thursday quashed the treason conviction of Gen. Draza Mihailovic for his collaboration with Nazis during World War II, politically rehabilitating...

Every May it comes around: valedictories to "victory" in the "good" war, as if World War II were all and only about defeating the totalitarian monster Hitler.

That's the two-dimensional visions of the war that is decked in bunting, marked by parades, endlessly featured in books, movies and miniseries.

But there was another war.

This other war was the Soviet war of deception, corruption and subversion waged from Moscow against the US and GB. While FDR and Churchill embraced "Uncle Joe" Stalin as their indispensable ally against their common enemy Hitler, "Uncle Joe" Stalin was all the while secretly waging a covert war against them, his putative allies, FDR and Churchill, directing...

A New Yorker essay by David K. Shipler titled "Pamela Geller and the Anti-Islam Movement" opens thus:

The winning cartoon in the contest to draw the Prophet Muhammad, early this month in Garland, Texas, which two gunmen attacked, depicts a fierce Prophet waving a scimitar and saying, “You can’t draw me!” The artist, whose hand and pencil are visible, replies from outside the frame, “That’s why I draw you.”

Note: This word-picture is the only "picture" New Yorker readers get. The prize-winning political cartoon by Bosch Fawstin (above) is nowhere to be found -- surely an extra irony for a magazine whose existence depends in large part on the thousands of social and political cartoons it has published through the decades. Come to think of it, Fawstin's sharp cartoon-commentary on Islam's death-penalty prohibition on drawing (also critiquing, even factually discussing) Mohammed...

Founder of Arabs for Israel Nonie Darwish, who tells her fascinating story of being the ex-Muslim daughter of a celebrated Egyptian "shahid" in Now They Call Me Infidel, offers a thought-provoking insight (above) on the impact she sees Islam -- specifically Islamic terrorism -- having on Americans.

Terrorism in the Islamic world, she explains, is a tool that is used at every level of government and in the family, too, as a "legal tool" of sharia enforcement. Such terror-violence, in other words, is perfectly normal in Islamic society, and is in accord with Islamic law. People, including "moderate" Muslims, have long been desensitized to such terrorism and accept it.

However, she says:

I am noticing that America is starting to feel that terrorism is normal -- we get excited, we see the torture,...

Fox News' Jeanine Pirro opened her last show with a pro-free-speech, anti-sharia stemwinder that Mediaite aptly described in a headline as "Sharia Law Is Coming for Your Free Speech." The summary concluded:

Pirro did add that she thought Geller’s event, which was attacked by two gunmen last weekend, was probably a `dumb move,' which is pretty much what all the critics of it are saying.

Out of the mouths of Mediaite. With that "dumb move" dismissal, Pirro entered the left-to-right media mainstream, which has overwhelmingly thrown its support to the totalitarian sharia principles that some, including conservatives such as Pirro, also disavow.

Listening to Laura Ingraham's interview with Pamela Geller, I made some notes on their lines of argument. Geller, obviously, is for the cartoon contest as an exercise of the American right to speech free from Islamic dictates; Ingraham supports Geller's right to free speech but opposes the contest, nonetheless, as not "helpful."

Geller opens by taking exception to Ingraham's earlier comment calling the cartoon contest needlessly provocative. Geller argues that, on the contrary, it is murdering cartoonists that is needlessly provocative, and then says something about the importance of not surrendering to violent sharia enforcement. Once established, she says, we...

Kudos to Tom Trento's United West for this critically important series of man-on-the-street interviews with Muslims attending the recent "Stand with the Prophet" convention in Garland, Texas. It is no spoiler to reveal that on being asked to condemn the Islamic blasphemy law, not a single Muslim interviewed would do so. It really has to be seen to be believed.

Islamic blasphemy law is Ground Zero in the clash between Islam and the West. It is also the mechanism of Islam's totalitarian command over its folllowers.

Islamic blasphemy law is also wholly and utterly at odds -- no, at war -- with Western standards, Western norms, regarding life on earth as an individual with God-given rights and protected liberties. Such rights and liberties include, of course, the right to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience. This is where we in the West are "coming from" -- the sharia-enforcing media excepted...

Let's talk about the Garland, Texas, attack by enforcers of Islamic law. Not the physical attack by two Muslim enforcers of Islamic law, but rather the figurative, hardly less virulent attacks by mainly Christian enforcers of Islamic law on cartoon contest organizer Pamela Geller, free speech activist and head of American Freedom Defense Initiative. Judging by the intensity of these ongoing attacks, Geller, a person of exceptional courage, is also extremely effective.

As with all things jihad, the physical attack on Geller's day-long Mohammed cartoon event, which temporarily secured a small piece of the public square where Americans who so desired could exercise their speech free from Islamic law, followed patterns as old as Islam and as current as the latest news cycles all over the globe. For this reason, it is hard to imagine anyone was shocked...

For 70 years now, anniversaries of the end of the Second World War in Europe -- the "Good War" -- have neglected to reckon with another milestone: the approximate anniversary of Operation Keelhaul, the Allied operation that forcibly repatriated literally millions of people, Soviet-claimed anti-Communists in the Western war zones at war's end, to Stalin's Gulag or the firing squad.

Following another recent jihadist effort (thankfully thwarted) to destroy a Christian church in France, the essayist Fjordman commented:

"The differences between the Middle East and Europe are growing smaller every day."

Following another jihadist attack (thankfully, only jihadists were killed) on a Texas gathering of courageous artists and other defenders of free speech, it seems that the differences between Europe and the US are getting smaller every day.

The catalyst on both continents, Old World and New, is the same. It is Islam. To put our shared plight as succinctly as possible (borrowing from Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders), the more Islam there is in a society, the less freedom there is.

Now for the reality check.

When a group of people peacefully gathering for an afternoon to discuss or protest or otherwise exercise their lawful rights to free speech...

The AP's Edward Kennedy, who believed news of the end of World War II belonged to the world, not the Soviet propaganda department.

Almost exactly seventy years ago this week, Allied military censors prevented the Associated Press's Wes Gallagher from filing a story, one week before VE-Day, reporting that American and British armies, sweeping across northern Europe into Germany in the spring of 1945, "could have easily taken Berlin before the Russians did so in May 1945 but for some reason were not allowed to do so." (The same thing went for Vienna and Prague.)

Here is the story and its ramifications, as discussed in American Betrayal, pp 322-326: